The expression slum is being used far too indiscriminately today.
One speaks of informal settlements in more or less scientific terms, referring to different realities. However, the facility with which the term is pronounced fails to do justice to the complexity of its history.
In a short genealogy contained in “Planet of Slums” Mike Davis retraces the first definition of slum, attributing it to a text from 1812 in which it appears as a synonym of “racket” or “criminal trade”.
The term was not used to indicate a place, but a disadvantaged social condition. The first spatial definitions of the phenomenon appeared in the late 19th century.
Since then the term has migrated from the strictly criminological jargon and become widely used to indicate a physical place. Cardinal Wiseman, the first Archbishop of Westminster used it to indicate “spaces where low-life trade was conducted” but it was not until 1889 that the sociologist Charles Booth traced a map of the poverty and inequality in London and defined slums as places characterized by dilapidated dwellings, overcrowding, disease and vice.
As of the early 20th century informal settlements have become subject of growing interest: authors as Patrick Geddes, Charles Abrams, Jacinta Prunty and Emmett Larkin examine it to tackle the parallel themes of urban growth and worsening of poverty, but we have to wait until the next century to see the first ‘scientific’ analysis of the theme. The Challenge of Slums report by UN-Habitat from 2003 is the first systematic study on the phenomenon of slums which unites data on poverty, on the conditions of informal settlements and on housing politics in thirty-four metropolises across the world. It utilizes a comparative database with information on families, income and the growth rate of the population.
The value of the report lies in the fact that it offers a comparative study of the problem on an international level, studying it on the basis of common indicators concerning the physical and juridical characteristics of the settlements.
Since then UN-Habitat has produced, and is still producing, numerous reports at regular intervals, which combine analyses, projects of various types and comparisons – applicable to the individual studies – of the progress made.
timeline
1812 James Hardy Vaux, Vocabulary of the Flash Language /Slum is synonymous with “racket” or “criminal trade” or backroom, rear entrance of any house or activity.
1821 Pierce Egan, Life in London / Slum means “squalid district, an unusual part of the city”.
1850 Charles Dickens, A December Vision / “I saw innumerable hosts, fore-doomed to darkness, dirt, pestilence, obscenity, misery and early death”.
1870 Cardinal Wiseman, Devil’s Acre in Westminster / “Close under the Abbey of Westminster there lie concealed labyrinths of lanes and courts, and alleys and slums, nests of ignorance, vice, depravity, and crime, as well as of squalor, wretchedness, and disease; whose atmosphere is typhus, whose ventilation is cholera”.
1889 Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London /The first map of poverty revealing the spatial distribution of poverty and inequality is produced. The streets are coloured according to the economic class of the residents
1910 Patrick Geddes, in Lewis Mumford, “The city of History”, New York, 1968 / “Slum, semislum and superslum …. to this has come the evolution of the city”.
1964 Charles Abrams, Man‘s Struggle for Shelter: In an Urbanizing World / A contribution to the understanding of the different national programs and the efforts of international agencies towards an agrarian reform and a correct housing policy.
1970 Jacinta Prunty and Emmett Larkin, Dublin Slums, 1800-1925: A study in Urban Geography / The poorest neighbourhoods of Dublin are explored
1985 Alice Coleman, Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing
1995 Tekin Latife, Tales from the garbage hills / “One night a group of about 7 families invaded a garbage dump on the outskirts of Istanbul and built some tiny shacks from scraps of wood, tin and cardboard found in the dump”.
2003 United Nations, Challenge of slums / Report on human settlements, first global census of slums.
2006 Mike Davis, Planet of slums / rapid urban growth in the context of structural adjustment, currency devaluation and state retrenchment has been an inevitable recipe for the mass production of slums.
2007 Fabrizio Floris, Urban excesses. Shantytowns, refugee camps and psychedelic cities / Tale on three forms of new urban realities: a shantytown, a refugee camp and a marginalized district on the city outskirts.
